Windows 2000 and Hibernate

[Muse]

I discovered this not long ago and often use it. Windows starts taking up exactly where you left off. On my system, however, I wonder if something's not wrong. Whenever I hibernate instead of Shut Down or Restart, everything restores fine and I can start computing but about 10 or 15 seconds later everything just freezes up for 30 - 45 seconds (guessing). The mouse cursor is frozen, nothing responds. Then everything is fine. A few minutes ago I awoke my hibernating system and after the mouse cursor became unfrozen I could only compute for about 5 or 10 seconds and it froze up again. A half minute later things thawed out again and I had another 5 or 10 seconds before it froze again. This cycle kept happening and wouldn't stop. It took me 5 or 10 minutes to manage to shut down my applications what with all this freezing and I managed to do a regular restart and now things look OK. Is there something wrong with my system? I have noticed that Win2k makes a hiberfil.sys file in the partition's root directory, and it's around 1/2 GB and this doesn't go away. I wonder if it might not be a good idea to delete this once in a while. Just guessing. Thanks for any help.

 

[AndyHui]

The hiberfil.sys file does remain permanently on drive and is normal.

In most cases, these sorts of problems can be solved by having the latest drivers and the latest BIOS update for your motherboard. Have you tried that?

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: AndyHui
The hiberfil.sys file does remain permanently on drive and is normal.

In most cases, these sorts of problems can be solved by having the latest drivers and the latest BIOS update for your motherboard. Have you tried that?

I did do a BIOS flash on my MB but it's been a while. I'm checking to see if a more recent one is out there. Drivers too. Thanks.

 

[NogginBoink]

Are you making any hardware changes while the system is hibernated (such as docking/undocking)?

Plug and Play can't get device removal/insert notifications when the system is in a hibernated state. It's against the rules to make hardware changes while hibernated, and you could lose data.

Like... ALL of your data.

(Does that sound like the voice of experience? It should.)

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: NogginBoink
Are you making any hardware changes while the system is hibernated (such as docking/undocking)?

Plug and Play can't get device removal/insert notifications when the system is in a hibernated state. It's against the rules to make hardware changes while hibernated, and you could lose data.

Like... ALL of your data.

(Does that sound like the voice of experience? It should.)

🙂 Words to the wise. I don't have a docking system. No hardware changes for some time, so it's not that. I don't know what it was. I just awoke my system from a hibernated state and it was as typical. Indeed there was little going on with my system. It reached a phase where it was frozen. This isn't normal? I have no way of knowing. This has happened to me EVERY time I've awakened (started) my system from a hibernated state. It freezes (mouse, keyboard have NO response) for a 1/2 minute or so. Is this NOT normal?????

 

[c0rv1d43]

As has already been suggested this sort of behavior is usually caused by drivers that aren't quite up to snuff. The most common single cause in my experience has been on notebook computers with PC Card NICs which have their own built-in power management features. But I've seen the behavior in desktop systems, too. A lot of drivers, even signed ones, really aren't fully ACPI-compliant (at least not in a bug-free way), and Windows has a hard time trying to work with the driver which is hanging there in a half-awake state. Did you look in the Event Viewer? Some of the machines that have displayed this behavior have had perfmon errors, driver errors and even service errors that give strong clues as to the identity of the guilty device.

- Collin

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: c0rv1d43
As has already been suggested this sort of behavior is usually caused by drivers that aren't quite up to snuff. The most common single cause in my experience has been on notebook computers with PC Card NICs which have their own built-in power management features. But I've seen the behavior in desktop systems, too. A lot of drivers, even signed ones, really aren't fully ACPI-compliant (at least not in a bug-free way), and Windows has a hard time trying to work with the driver which is hanging there in a half-awake state. Did you look in the Event Viewer? Some of the machines that have displayed this behavior have had perfmon errors, driver errors and even service errors that give strong clues as to the identity of the guilty device.

- Collin

I just checked my Event Viewer and there are errors. When I booted this morning from a hibernated state and experienced the usual freeze for around 45 seconds this error was registered:

The device, \Device\Scsi\viadsk1, did not respond within the timeout period.

I this this might implicate my VIA IDE driver. VIA drivers are notorious for problems IIRC. My MB (Epox 8K7A) has a VIA south bridge. Maybe there's something I can do about that, don't know. I just installed all the drivers recommended at the Epox website for my MB, the AMD miniport and AGP driver for Windows 2000. Haven't hibernated yet but I doubt that the problem's solved. That in itself was an ordeal because I had to reboot about 4 times and I had to reinstall my Video driver. However, things look OK at the present time. Think I will hibernate after posting this and check back in with an edit to this post.... Yes, the freeze happened again and I timed it this time - about 33 seconds and then the mouse activity, etc. was normal. Event viewer shows the typical Error events, both with the message above about the viadsk1 timeout and about 0.4 seconds apart. There are from a day and more ago similar errors implicating Ultra1, which I think is my Promise Ultra100 HD controller card. I guess that Win2000 tries to access the devices and can't because the wake up from hibernation hasn't completed. That's an intuitive call there, not technically grounded of course.

 

[c0rv1d43]

Yeah, some of the VIA problems with particular motherboards (and sometimes particular combinations of devices) are really intractable. I'll hope for good results.

- Collin

 

[c0rv1d43]

Well, rats! I see you edited and added negative news whilst I was composing my brief reply.

I'm afraid I don't know what to suggest next. Do you suppose it's possible that your system's power management functions might work better under WinXP? (I should probably duck when suggesting that.) I have no experience with VIA chipsets. I've only been working with Windows a couple of years, and I've always used Intel motherboards and processors and chipsets. I know there has been a LOT of information (and vituperation) exchanged over this issue in hardware sections here and elsewhere. (Ars Technica comes to mind.) I don't know if there has been a consensus or not. Heh-heh. What's the likelihood of a consensus in a hardware forum? 😀

Even though this is related to Win2K's power management functions, it's certainly also a hardware issue. You might give 'em a shot. I hope you find a solution. I feel your pain. Crap like this, even though it's fairly easily avoidable, just annoys the hell out of me! Just 'cause it ought to work right, dangit!

- Collin

 

[Muse]

A search of groups.google.com reveals that it's pretty common for people to experience freezes after hibernating. My problem is relatively mild compared to people who's systems become unusable. At least mine usually recovers in less than a minute and I can proceed. There may be a fix and it may be simple. For instance, maybe I can change the timeout for my HDDs or maybe there's some other configuration. Meantime, hibernate is still a great option for me and I use it at least 60% of the time when I shut down.

 

[c0rv1d43]

I know what you mean. When I was using Win2K hibernate was practically the only "shutdown" method I used with my notebooks when I was traveling. It just took too danged long to go through a boot process every time I wanted to use the notebook. In WinXP there's barely 15 seconds difference between coming out of hibernation and a full boot, so I don't usually use hibernate. (It does work perfectly, though.)

Likewise on a desktop system running Win2K I guess you should be able to save some time by hibernating, but I don't think the non-portable device vendors have been very careful to try to make their hardware and drivers fully compliant.

I'm sorry you didn't really get a resolution to this, at least yet. But maybe something will turn up.

- Collin

 

[VirtualLarry]

I just checked my Event Viewer and there are errors. When I booted this morning from a hibernated state and experienced the usual freeze for around 45 seconds this error was registered:

The device, \Device\Scsi\viadsk1, did not respond within the timeout period.

I this this might implicate my VIA IDE driver. VIA drivers are notorious for problems IIRC. My MB (Epox 8K7A) has a VIA south bridge. Maybe there's something I can do about that, don't know. I just installed all the drivers recommended at the Epox website for my MB, the AMD miniport and AGP driver for Windows 2000. Haven't hibernated yet but I doubt that the problem's solved. That in itself was an ordeal because I had to reboot about 4 times and I had to reinstall my Video driver. However, things look OK at the present time. Think I will hibernate after posting this and check back in with an edit to this post.... Yes, the freeze happened again and I timed it this time - about 33 seconds and then the mouse activity, etc. was normal. Event viewer shows the typical Error events, both with the message above about the viadsk1 timeout and about 0.4 seconds apart. There are from a day and more ago similar errors implicating Ultra1, which I think is my Promise Ultra100 HD controller card. I guess that Win2000 tries to access the devices and can't because the wake up from hibernation hasn't completed. That's an intuitive call there, not technically grounded of course.

Via southbridge and Promise IDE? I wish you luck, my friend, you will need it.

Suggestion - get the newest BIOS and Via drivers that you can for this board, or upgrade to XP, and replace the Promise Ultra100 card with something more stable, like an HPT370+ or a Promise Ultra TX2 card. Both the Via southbride, and the Promise Ultra100, have data-corruption problems, and the combination is even worse. Perhaps your hibernation file is even getting corrupted when written to/read from, that might be causing additional errors.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry

I just checked my Event Viewer and there are errors. When I booted this morning from a hibernated state and experienced the usual freeze for around 45 seconds this error was registered:

The device, \Device\Scsi\viadsk1, did not respond within the timeout period.

I this this might implicate my VIA IDE driver. VIA drivers are notorious for problems IIRC. My MB (Epox 8K7A) has a VIA south bridge. Maybe there's something I can do about that, don't know. I just installed all the drivers recommended at the Epox website for my MB, the AMD miniport and AGP driver for Windows 2000. Haven't hibernated yet but I doubt that the problem's solved. That in itself was an ordeal because I had to reboot about 4 times and I had to reinstall my Video driver. However, things look OK at the present time. Think I will hibernate after posting this and check back in with an edit to this post.... Yes, the freeze happened again and I timed it this time - about 33 seconds and then the mouse activity, etc. was normal. Event viewer shows the typical Error events, both with the message above about the viadsk1 timeout and about 0.4 seconds apart. There are from a day and more ago similar errors implicating Ultra1, which I think is my Promise Ultra100 HD controller card. I guess that Win2000 tries to access the devices and can't because the wake up from hibernation hasn't completed. That's an intuitive call there, not technically grounded of course.

Via southbridge and Promise IDE? I wish you luck, my friend, you will need it.

Suggestion - get the newest BIOS and Via drivers that you can for this board, or upgrade to XP, and replace the Promise Ultra100 card with something more stable, like an HPT370+ or a Promise Ultra TX2 card. Both the Via southbride, and the Promise Ultra100, have data-corruption problems, and the combination is even worse. Perhaps your hibernation file is even getting corrupted when written to/read from, that might be causing additional errors.

Actually it IS a Promise TX2 Ultra100 IDE card, sorry for the confusion. AFAIK, things have been pretty stable. I did have some real problems early on with the system sporadically rebooting on bootup and I think it was a corrupted driver. When I rebuilt my machine, reinstalling Windows 2000 SP2 from scratch, that problem disappeared never to reappear. I really have had no aggravating problems since then and it's been several months. I've heard a lot of negative things about VIA chipsets, but it's just the south bridge and maybe it's not an issue.